PHYSICS

PHIL BOND, U.S. Undersecretary of Commerce for Technology, March 7, 2002
CZIKOWSKY: In the latest version of art imitating life, last night’s “West Wing” presented to the public the debate over the superconductor. Do you have any thoughts on the superconductor
BOND: The superconductor was a super debate of years past. But it represents a fundamental point to me: there is an appropriate role for government in the pursuit of basic scientific thought and knowledge. A quick example: one of the research scientists at the National Institute of Standards and Technology was a co-winner of a Nobel Prize this year, a young man named Eric Cornell. He won that for discovering something known as the Bose-Einstein condensate---a form of matter that Einstein theorized about. It has been the holy grail of science for years.
His discovery will not yield immediate results in increased productivity. It will not lead to new computers next year. But he fundamentally helped advance human knowledge, and that will benefit us all in ways we can’t yet imagine.

SYLVESTER JAMES GATES, JR., Howard University Physics Professor, October 12, 2005
CZIKOWSKY: Wasn’t it true that one of Einstein’s theories was disproven while he was alive, and that Einstein died thinking he was wrong, only it was later discovered he was right after all?
GATES: That is sort of true.
When he first rote the equations for the Theory of General Relativity, he introduced what is called “the cosmological constant.” This was done in order to make the mathematics describe a static and eternal universe. Also, this was before the astronomer Hubble and others showed that our universe is expanding.
Later when the expansion was observed, he had to set the cosmological constant to zero. So he died thinking that he had made a mistake introducing it.
Within the last decade, by observing supernova (a type of exploding star) we have learned that the rate of the expansion of the universe is increasing. The simplest way to do this is to re-introduce the cosmological constant. However, it must appear with the opposite sign from the one he was using.

PETER SMITH, NASA Phoenix Mission Principal Investigator and BURT RUTAN, aeronautical engineer, October 1, 2008
CZIKOWSKY: If a golf ball were hit into space and if it never hit another object, would it in fact curve over time?
SMITH: Sure, it would be attracted by the forces of gravity that govern the orbits of all objects in space and would end up as a tiny asteroid orbiting the Sun.
RUTAN: Golf on a large asteroid…climb the highest mountain and use a long tee, you will be able to drive the ball into a stable, continuous orbit that returns to where you hit it.
CZIKOWSKY: If nothing can move faster than the speed of light, and if light consists of both particles and waves, aren’t the waves, which travel in different directions while maintaining the same forward momentum of traveling at the speed of light, in fact traveling at a speed greater than the speed of light while moving in their nonlinear trajectory?
SMITH: Photos move only at the speed of light; however single waves can travel faster; it is wave packets that contain information that are stuck with the speed limit c.